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Finding the Next Einstein

Most of us spend four years in high school, but every once in a while you’ll hear about some prodigy who enters college earlier than typical. For example, Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, entered Yale University at age 15. Gell-Mann turned out pretty successful, but what about people who entered college early as a whole?

How much of your math achievement later in life is due to your stable underlying characteristics like general cognitive abilities and personality, and how much is due to your prior math competency or knowledge? The answer to this question is important, because it can help us know how to direct where and when math interventions might be targeted for the greatest payoff.

Economists interested in education have recently started to evaluate gifted education programs. In this piece, we provide a critique of the recent economic studies from the perspective of researchers who study this population regularly.

How will our understanding of human intelligence be fundamental to the future of humankind? I discuss this and more with the founder and editor of Intelligence, a journal that explores the current state of knowledge surrounding how smart we are and how smart we can be.

When we think of a teacher, we often think of our childhoods and desks, and the person at the head of the classroom. But in many ways all of us are teachers in so many aspects of everyday life. Whenever we want to educate someone about something, or help them understand our perspective or point of view, drawing from the craft of teaching can be helpful.

In "Love In A Damp Climate," Quentin Fottrell recounts the 10 years of advice he gave on the radio about how to navigate relationships with friends, family members, and partners. Here are six lessons on love and life distilled from his work.

Curiosity, according to Ian Leslie, is a combination of intelligence, persistence, and hunger for novelty, all wrapped up in one. Leslie, in his book Curious, explores the power of curiosity through a combination of entertaining anecdotes and summaries of pertinent research across many fields. From his work, I have distilled seven ways we might all become more curious.

You know the name Barack Obama. You likely do not know the name David Plouffe. That’s because Plouffe was the invisible supporting the visible: he was Obama’s campaign manager. In his latest book "Invisibles" author David Zweig tells the stories of many people who have found great satisfaction and power in behind-the-scenes work, including his own.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary on the life and craft of the great 85 year old sushi master Jiro Ono who owns a tiny 10 seat shop in Tokyo that has the highest Michelin Guide rating of 3 stars. Here is the wisdom distilled from the great sushi chef on how to master your craft.

“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.” – Richard Feynman

Over at The Upshot, David Leonhardt provides data showing that it is harder than ever to get into one of the Ivies. Could a Flynn effect for geniuses, or more gifted students today than ever before, be part of the explanation?

This cartoon has been shared well over 300,000 times. It is from Quick Meme and is titled “Our Education System In A Nutshell.” It apparently resonates widely with people. It initially resonated with me. Until I actually stopped to think.

At 16, Albert Einstein wrote his first scientific paper titled “The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields.” This was the result of his famous gedanken experiment in which he visually imagined chasing after a light beam. The insights he gained from this thought experiment led to the development of his theory of special relativity.

If you enjoy playing Scrabble, you might like a new game I recently discovered called three words created by software engineer Jason Tan. It takes basic elements of Scrabble and turns them into a puzzle. You have to use the letters given to create three words that fill the blank squares to maximize your score.

Should you have a kid? More than one kid? How much can you influence them? “Parents picture kids as clay they mold for life, when they’re actually more like flexible plastic that responds to pressure, but pops back into its original shape when the pressure is released.”
- Bryan Caplan

Everyone is now discussing the new SAT overhaul. Much focus seems to be on specific test content changes. However, at least in selective college admissions, one aspect of the test remains ignored: the SAT is still too easy for the most academically talented students.

Elite sports competition generates a lot of discussion and debate. Much is bar stool yapping about who was the best ever but some is more serious about topics that include the role of talent and practice in elite performance. So, here are a few thoughts about talent and practice that you might ponder during the Olympics.

Are smart people being channeled down certain pathways to their and our detriment? Instead, should they be building ventures that help build local communities? Where can they have the greatest impact? I talk with Andrew Yang, founder of Venture For America and author of Smart People Should Build Things, to explore these important questions.

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About Finding the Next Einstein

Finding the Next Einstein: Why Smart is Relative discusses research findings and ideas that touch upon multiple issues surrounding the identification and development of talent, and explores how these issues might be relevant to what's going on in the world.